Activity Sampling
Track your time and stay relaxed
If you feel overwhelmed by all the things you need to do, if at the end of the day you hardly know what you’ve accomplished, if constantly you’ve a hard time focusing, then I suggest you start with explicit time management.
Time management is the art of planning what you do before you do it, and tracking what you do, while you’re doing it. And later on reflect on how things went.
A lot has been written about the planning part of time management. How to prioritize your tasks, how to keep a calendar and a to-do list etc. But how about tracking what you actually do?
Time Tracking for Deliberate Practice
I find time tracking important for three reasons:
- Time tracking transforms feeling into facts. If at the end of the day you’re dissatisfied with what you’ve accomplished that’s just a feeling. You’re frustrated. Maybe you think you did not tackle enough problems, maybe you think you did not spend enough time on certain tasks. Maybe that’s true — but maybe not. How do you actually know? There is no record of your activities. It’s all just in your head (or heart), especially if you were not able to produce tangible results (yet).
You know how subjective our perception of time (and its usage) can be. Sometimes time flies, sometimes time crawls. To really improve on your usage of time you need to become more objective. - Time tracking helps you focus. It’s like an accountability partner reminding you of a resolution or a goal. Just knowing there will be a record of what you do makes you less prone to deviate.
- Time tracking helps you sticking to your plan. Doing your prioritization, allotting time in your calendar and/or writing down a list of tasks is no guarantee you actually will be doing all that. But if you also write down when you really start working on a task or finish it, then you take your own plan seriously.
That said I’ve to admit: I find time tracking a nuisance. It’s extra effort in an already packed day. It’s hard to remember to constantly update your task log.
At least as long as you think of time tracking along the usual lines. That means: You track your time by writing down when you start a task, you write down when you finish a task, you write down, when you pause work on a task for a significant of time. (Whether you use pen and paper or a tool like toggle does not matter.)
I call that push time tracking. Because you have to push updates into your tool.
Push time tracking has the benefit of being precise. You log exact times for every task. On the other hand, well, it’s tedious.
Turning Time Tracking 180° Around
To see how time tracking can become easier it’s necessary to understand where its push nature is coming from. Because the need to push is what puts the burden on you. You have to remember to update the log upon an activity change.
The push is not god given, though. It’s man made. It’s inevitable if you want to be flawless in your measurements of what you do and how long it takes.
But let’s question that premise. Is it really necessary to know exactly when you start/finish a task or take a break? I mean, do you need to know down to the minute? Or even down to five minutes?
I don’t think so. Not even for billing clients it’s usually necessary (or feasible) to be precise to 1, 5 even 10 minutes.
Also, such precision probably is an illusion. Because man is fallible. You forget to log a task altogether. You first forget to log it and then later you remember and try to come up with “realistic” times for start/finish — and of course gloss over any breaks you took. Not even to mention the interruptions you attended to.
That means your precious activity log probably is not that precise at all. It’s just a rough log anyway. So why did you put up with all the frustration of push time tracking in the first place? You’re paying a price, but you don’t get much value for it in return.
Now, if push time tracking does not really deliver on its promise why stick with the tedious push? Why not turn the push around and make it a pull?
Pull time tracking is the opposite of push time tracking because it does not rely on you to remember updating your activity log.
Instead: Pull time tracking reminds you periodically to update your activity log.
With pull time tracking you offload the burden of remembering to a tool. And you give up the pressure of exact logging for just a rough idea of how much time you spent on each activity.
What you get still is a list of activities. But the activities are not tagged with a start and finish time. It’s not the time which pull time tracking focuses on. It’s the activities! Hence the list of activities is a list of timestamps each tagged with an activity. Thus you’ll find activities listed repeatedly in a pull time tracking log.
This is quite different from what you’re used to, but has two interesting effects:
- Firstly you see your work more as a kind of flow. Stretches of time become stretches of space in your log. Your usage of time becomes more tangible. Like in your calendar, which however is just a plan. Compared to that your pull time tracking log is reality.
- Secondly you get to see how much you were able to focus on tasks. Because pull time tracking, although it’s just periodically asking you for your current activity, can record what you’re doing more accurately. You’re simply more prone to log disturbances in your flow when you’re triggered from the outside to reflect on what you’re doing.
You see, pull time tracking is pretty different from push time tracking. Very different in a very positive way, I’d like to add. That’s why it deserves to also be called differently.
How about Activity Sampling? Because that’s what it is: the flow of your activities over the course of a day is sampled at a certain rate. Like with analog music which gets sampled to be recorded digitally.
Activity Sampling by Example
So much for the theoretical side of activity sampling (AS). But how does it actually look? How to do it?
Meet Janine. Janine is a knowledge worker coming into the office at 9 AM. First thing she does is start the AS tool of her choice (see below for suggestions). Then she grabs a cup of coffee and dives into work at 9:05 AM. Her first task is… light orange. It takes about 35 minutes to accomplish. Then Janine quickly talks to her boss. And at 9:50 AM starts with her next task… some other kind of orange. And so on and so on until it’s time for the gym just past 5:30 PM.
Janine is a very diligent worker. She smoothly moves from task to task. But she needs to take a break once in a while and like every one else is required to attend meetings.
Had Janine push tracked her time, there’d be 14 entries in her log. Each with a start and end time. (Or maybe just a start time, because if the next activity starts right away after the previous one both share a timestamp.)
But Janine is smart. Or maybe just wants to spend less mental energy on time tracking and more on value generation for her customers. Hence Janine uses AS. Her activity log consists of 18 entries — but those entries took her much less effort.
The AS log is the result of Janine’s responses to her AS tool’s reminders.
When she started her working day Janine set the sampling rate of her AS tool to 20 minutes. That means she wanted to get asked for her current activity every 20 minutes. The log thus is a list a snapshots of what Janine was doing at the moment when the AS tool asked her.
Of course, when you try to recreate Janine’s day from this log it will look differently:
But is the difference really significant?
Some tasks now look a bit longer/shorter than in reality. Some tasks are even missing. But does that really matter? I don’t think so.
What Janine can clearly see is the flow of her work:
- How many tasks did she work on? Were it few or many?
- How much time did she devote to each task?
- Were there significant interruptions or even task switches?
- How much time was unaccounted for because she was not at her desk?
This, to me, seems quite a wealth of information for so little effort. Because what Janine did was just:
- Set the AS sampling rate and start the AS tool once.
- Every time the AS tool reminds her, she notes what she is working on. This is especially quickly done if the current activity is the same as when she was asked last.
And if Janine wasn’t at her desk she did not respond to the reminder. Very simple. That’s perfectly okay and also carries information.
Tools for Activity Sampling
If this sounds good to you, how can you start with activity sampling? I think it’s very, very simple: grab any timer device, set it to the sampling rate of your liking (20 minutes have proven ideal for me) and get yourself reminded. Note down what you’re doing (even with timestamp) when the timer rings. Start the timer again. (Or have a recurring timer.)
Although activity sampling probably is a technique for people mostly working at a desk (office worker/knowledge worker), with an analog AS tool like above it can be used even if you don’t have a computer at hand.
But as long as you have a computer sitting next to you, you should use it for AS. An AS application reminding you is much more comfortable to use.
Unfortunately I haven’t yet found an app which fits the AS bill. I tried some pomodoro timers like Be focused or Focus Time — but even though they allow entering an activity and sound an alarm at intervals they don’t work for me. The Pomodoro Technique (PT) may seem close to activity sampling, but in the end it’s not. A cadence is not enough. PT still is time oriented whereas AS is activity focused. PT is trying to help manage your time. AS is just recording what you’re doing. Time management is orthogonal to AS. And that shows in the app landscape. PT apps are time management apps. What you need for AS is, well, an activity oriented tool, an AS app.
That, as it seems, does not exist yet, though. Bummer.
So what I did is I programmed an AS desktop app for the Mac myself. It’s running all the time when I work on my Mac. This is how it looks:
Mostly it’s sitting in the background. I don’t use this user interface very often. Because as you can see my activities are pretty long running. And I’m trying to focus. Hence the only time I need to switch to this overview is when I switch to another task. Then I type in a short description and hit the log-button.
However, as long as I stick to the same activity I simply have to respond to the periodic question with a click of the mouse:
An AS tool like this reminds me of a dead man’s switch: you’re still alive as long as you press the switch. But if you don’t… something is wrong. Or in the case of AS if you don’t respond to the question you’re not active in a log relevant way.
Since I’ve started using activity sampling my focus has much increased! I feel more concentrated, and I’m more content with my days because I can see at one glance what I’ve been doing.
Never mind small deviations, small breaks. It’s the overall flow that counts.
Finally I can complement my prioritization and task planning with time tracking. And in a relaxed, non-obtrusive way, too. I’m very happy with activity sampling.
You should try it, too!
If you like this article, show it by clicking the symbol or even share it. Thanks! Or you might have a look at my personal blog here or the (mostly German) blog on Clean Coding by the Clean Code Developer School. Or follow me on twitter.
